Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Film: "Buried"

This is the one about this American contractor in Iraq who is kidnapped by t-heads AND BURIED ALIVE. Only they leave him in a coffin with loads of air and a Blackberry that is still magically able to get a signal through the soil above. So he rings up people and tries to get them to rescue him. And that's it, really. Through the film you never see anyone outside the coffin (except at one point a video on his Blackberry), it's just pure claustrophobia from start to finish.

I liked the way the film stuck to its high concept premise, but ultimately I thought it was not fully successful. In a film like this, the two obvious endings are the happy one (He escapes from the coffin, huzzah!) and the downbeat one (He dies in the coffin, OMG teh sadness!), both of which seem a bit unsatisfying. And without saying what actually happens here, I can reveal that the film-makers did not pull an awesome third ending out of the hat, leaving the film a bit let down by its conclusion.

The film was actually made by Spanish people, which might explain why the main American guy the contractor talks to on phone has an English accent for no obvious reason.

An inuit panda production

No comments: